2012年8月5日星期日

Nina Garcia Thinks You Can Buy a Hermes Birkin Bag With a ‘Few Weeks’ Salary’

Nina Garcia, who is JC Penney’s newly-minted “Style Voice” and also a member of Moda Operandi’s advisory board, may want to brush up on how much the average American’s salary is. Because, if this tweet is anything to go by, the Project Runway judge and Marie Claire editor is kind of clueless.
She recently tweeted:

This is the bag that you can spend a few weeks’ salary on and not feel guilty. It is going to last you a lifetime.

The link goes to a Hermes Birkin bag auction on Moda Operandi, with purses ranging in price from $14,500 to a whopping $74,500. Assuming that ‘few’ probably means around three, this would mean that, by Garcia’s standards, you’d have to make somewhere between $4,884 and $24,833 every week, bringing your yearly salary to somewhere between $253,968 and $1.3 million. So, yeah, last time we checked, those Birkin bags aren’t gonna cost us just a ‘few weeks’ salary.

And we’re not alone. Garcia‘s Twitter followers were quick to call the editor out. ‏@mstewartsloan wrote, “@ninagarcia you might want to double check your math on this one.” While @gilded_lady wrote, “@ninagarcia a few weeks?! I love you Nina but [for] a lot of your followers $36k is way way more than ‘a few weeks’”

The average American wage is just $26,364. I know what you’re thinking, Nina: How on earth are these people buying their Birkins!? Well, thing is, they’re not.

Obviously, the fashion industry’s never exactly been a hotbed of economic awareness but, particularly in these shaky financial times, we think Garcia was a bit tone deaf on this one. There’s definitely a customer for a $20,000 Birkin bag, but maybe a Twitter blast wasn’t the best way to find one.